“I will avail myself,” said Sargon.
“And it’s equally easy to find your way back,” said Bobby with a faint flavour of anxiety in his voice.
“Have no fear, young man,” said Sargon in a tone of jolly reassurance. “Have no fear. I’ve found my way in many climes and under many conditions—the wild mountains—the trackless desert. Time and space.”
“Of course,” said Bobby. “I forgot that.
“Still—London is different,” said Bobby.
§ 9
The next day at about half-past four in the afternoon a small but heavily moustached figure, with eyes full of blue determination, emerged from Saint Paul’s Cathedral and stood at the top of the steps before the great doors, surveying the jostling traffic of Ludgate Hill and the Churchyard. There was a sort of valiant uncertainty in the figure’s pose, as though it was equally resolved to be up to something, and uncertain about what it meant to do. London had been looked at from the top of the Monument and from the Cathedral dome on a crystal-clear October day, and it had betrayed an unusual loveliness and greatness under the golden sunshine. But it had shown itself, too, as a vast dreamy multitudinousness in which none but those who are resolute and powerful in action can hope to escape being swallowed up. It had stretched away to wide sunlit stretches that seemed to be the horizon, and then up in the leaden-blue other stretches had been visible of houses, of shipping, of distant hills. The vans and carts in the shadowed streets below had looked like toys; the people were hats and hurrying legs and feet, curiously proportioned. And over all an immense dome of kindly cloud-flecked sky.
He had walked round the little gallery under the ball, muttering: “A wilderness. A city that has forgotten....
“How fair it might be. How great it might be!
“How fair and great it shall be!”